This dissertation charts the development and use of the collective historical memory of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the Victorian era through four lenses. The debate over importation of non-white indentured servants from the 1830s through the 1850s denotes the first public engagement with the memory of the slave trade. The anti-migration movement discussed the sufferings of the slave, arguing that importing indentured servants constituted the slave trade by another name. Those in favor of migration highlighted regulation and emphasized how Britain learned from history. In the end, the victory of the pro-migration lobby set the terms for how the slave trade would be referenced in the collective memory. Abolition, not suffering, would hold precedence. The Irish Famine migration of the 1840s is a temporal lieu de memoire for this abolition-centric memory. Accounts prior to 1848 invoked the slave trade as an example of why and how to improve conditions on the "coffin ships." After regulations passed, accounts illustrated those improvements. The focus on progress in the accounts surrounding Famine migration further reinforced the memory of the slave trade as abolition-centric. This historical memory became codified as historical fact through the education system. School books used by students who flooded the system after the Education Act of 1870 focused on twin themes of abolition and progress in discussions of the slave trade. The memory of the trade gained its greatest audience and cultural relevance, but concentration on abolition and progress, and not the suffering of the slave, significantly weakened the slave trade memory. This emerges in the final lens of investigation: the white slave trade panic. At the end of the Victorian era middle-class Britons feared the forced prostitution of European women. In order to rally support, social purists appropriated the language of African slave trade abolition. However, the loss of power of African slave trade imagery forced writers to devote attention to the sexual nature of the white slave trade. It was no longer sufficient to mention the African slave trade---by this point, the memory of the slave trade no longer had suffering at its root.
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